Thats a 20% damage nerf. Id say losing 20% of your total damage output is substantial.
That’s like a billionaire saying “but I’m poor now, I only earn 1.8 billion year year rather than 2 billion”…
No its not cause thats only 10%
My point is they didn’t want to do a hard nerf so they only did 2% knowing they might have to go more down the road.
I just dont believe in caps. No one wants to go to work and be told hey bud if you make 50 in tips your not getting paid anymore by the hour but you still gotta be here.
Game doesn’t need caps just needs balancing in the long term.
Caps are just a sticking plaster and don’t solve the issue that the skill is overturned to begin with.
Sorry Llama, don’t agree with you on this one 
I did say my preferred fix would be diminishing returns on the per-stack bonus. Ideally either an exponential or logarithmic one where you get a smooth transition from high bonus at low stacks to low bonus at high stacks.
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My preference would probably be the purple version below.
Still gets you 235% more damage (compared to bleed) at 50 stacks (currently you’d get 265%), 395% more damage at 100 stacks (currently 556%) but it’s not quite as bonkers.
So if they did that and gave the other dots some mechanical buffs (eg, bleed reduced damage the bleeding mob deals per stack, diminishing returns, ingite increases damage taken by other fire/elemental damage also diminishing returns) that would help to bring the other dots into line with poison.
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And Ferrari replied; no need, there is a Speed Limit that applies to all public roads.
A global “speed limit” is lazy design and essentially would show that the developers do not understand the levers they can adjust in their game to fix problem builds.
The coolest parts of games like this is the silly amount of combinations that are possible and the discovery aspect of finding these strong synergies.
If DPS or damage output or monster life loss was limited, it takes away a fair bit of the satisfaction of finding these powerful synergies as the game then becomes, what is necessary to hit the limit rather than how strong can I be? It becomes a goalpost and makes any choices past hitting that goalpost meaningless.
Yes having the OP part of a build nerfed stinks as many people will lean on this OP node or piece to the build and prop themselves up on it since the skill is doing the work rather than having decent gear or anything behind them as a backbone. Losing this does stink but can be necessary for the future health of the game especially if there are changes they want to make and have an infinitely scaling survival mode
I think it depends how it’s handled. If it’s just slapped on such that any half-way competent build can hit it then yes, it would be a lazy way to fix a problem. But if it’s set such that only a few would hit it then that’s much less of an issue.
Also, sometimes caps are put in to protect other parts of the game, such as client/server sync (Sacred 2 had a movement speed cap so that the player couldn’t move fast enough to cause desync with the server).
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Thats a very fair point, I guess my main concern is if this were implemented on monsters damage taken / damage output, this would become a disappointing wall.
There can be useful caps put in place. PoE has a resistance cap of 75% base. This is a manditory minimum for all builds to hit. But before recently, players could get a stat to raise this cap even up to 100% (making them immune to that damage type). This wasnt healthy for the game and thus they made a soft cap of 75% and then a hard cap of 90%.
It makes sense to have movement and defensive stats limited. I am shocked that glancing blow and block chance and crit strike avoidance do not have caps. Ideally damage is something id like to see the top end not limited
Glancing blow/crit strike avoidance have an effective cap of 100% (more gives no benefit) & block also has an effective cap (somewhere in the high 70s I think plus an additional ~25% for 4s on Ring of Shields cast).
But none of those can make you immune to damage, Glancing blow “only” reduces damage from hits (not dots) by 50%, crit avoidance “only” allows you to ignore the increased damage from crits & block “only” allows you to use a higher protection figure for damage calculations (again, only against hits, plus you can’t have it permanently against all hits). I view them (glancing blow/crit avoidance) as similar to getting your resists to 75% in PoE, every build should do it if you want to do end-game & end-game is balanced around having them.
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Seeing that these stats dont have a cap, its almost obligatory to get to that 100% since they are that powerful. I am surprised the developers hadnt limited this to a lower value since these 2 stats in conjuction are so massively powerful.
But i do see your point, I could see value in defensive limitations but i dont see very much value in offensive limitations like op was describing to avoid collateral damage with nerfs
They do have a cap, 100%. If glancing blow didn’t have a cap, values above 100% would provide more benefit (say, 200% would mean you take 25% damage). Plus there’s a limit to the number of affix slots you can get them on.
The benefit in offensive limitations (ideally diminishing returns) is to have more builds that are capable of reaching, say, within 10% of the top dps number. Then you can gradually buff the under-performing builds so that there are more comparable builds.
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We are discussing semantics at this point on the idea of what is considered a cap.
Since more or less every other game has a hard cap of 100% for stats and often has diminishing returns to never allow you to get there, this doesnt actually feel like a cap. I was expecting an effective cap to glancing blow chance at 50% or 75% since then its a choice. But in the current iteration, 3 or 4 pieces with the “set glancing blow” affix gets you to 100% and over easily.
This game is unique in the sense that where over 100% for a stat actually does things. In most other games, If you reach 100% ignite or poison chance, you just poison or ignite with each hit. But nothing over 100%.
I could see the value in diminishing returns but it very much depends on what is being adjusted. The poison calculations/damage should absolutely be scaled via diminishing returns after a certain point.
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But they’re the best things to discuss!
If they did limit glancing blow/crit avoidance, the game would be spikier (some hits would be glancing & others wouldn’t so those would hit twice as hard, especially if they were a crit!) which wouldn’t feel particularly nice. Plus they’d probably need to reduce the damage output of mobs to compensate for the reduced damage reduction the players can access.
It is another lever for them to pull. I do truely belive that glancing blow/crit avoid is too easy to cap and far too powerful and that other defensive options really pale in comparison since they are diminishing and really only seem to protect a flat amount.
Ideally, id like to see these 2 stats nerfed and the other defensive options brought up to be much more relevant.
Wow, this thread had a lot to take in, almost overwhelming, lol.
For a while, Lich was the only class to reach 500+ in arena and the result of that wasn’t a nerf to it in 0.7.7 but general buffs to every class. Now the ladder finally has some high end diversity in the 500+ range.
Forge Guard and Spell Blade hit 700+
Lich and Sorcerer are at 600+
And finally the lonely Druid managed to break 500+
Ideally, I think given enough investment, every sub-class should be able to hit this milestone. It would be interesting to know exactly what got them that far, but from what I’ve seen so far myself, skill goes a long way in not making fatal mistakes and getting blown up. I would love to be able to see their passives, skill nodes and gear for their builds though.
These would be the prime examples to look at for any truly broken mechanics or ideas for what other skills should aspire to. The 2 lich builds show diversity as they only share 2 skills while the 2 sorcerer builds are almost carbon copies with only 1 different skill.
As far as poison goes, sure it’s infinitely scaling, but mechanically capped. There are only so many stacks you can apply before you finally kill something, and there are other things to evaluate as well. If the time to kill is long enough, you are still vulnerable to attack so having 50 stacks doesn’t matter if you’re dead. On the other hand, if you have a lot of different poison applications and build pure tank, at what point do you break down mentally waiting for high health enemies to wither and die in a war of attrition? You would think at some point, even if you made every single affix for defense, there will eventually be something strong enough that can hit you hard enough to kill faster than your poison stacks can whittle away at their huge HP bar.
With that being said, ignite and bleed need some love. Just by providing utility, while not necessarily doing the killing on its own, the DPS combined with other skills could more than make up for that gap.
Ultimately, I don’t agree with having caps unless it’s necessary for game performance, bug fixes, etc. The game is still young and has a lot of room to grow. Eventually there will be new skills and possibly classes I would hope, but when it comes to more difficult content, it should be the gear getting stronger (while updating old pieces on new drops) to compensate for the difficulty and maybe 5 more points to use in skills to bolster their strength (so many nodes left incomplete!)
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Caps = overperforming builds are capped; all other builds remain intact
Nerfs instead of caps = overperforming builds are nerfed (sometimes to the ground); all other standard builds that were using skills/passives/gear affected by the nerf are hammered too as collateral damage.
are those the only 2 options?